Sunday, December 30, 2012

Integreen Brings Open Source Traffic Monitoring To Italy

The best way to fight an enemy is to start by learning everything you can about it, which is exactly what the team at Integreen are looking to do in the Italian city of Bolzano.
By using the latest technology and banking on open source software,
Integreen hopes to provide the city management with enough traffic and
environmental data to help them more effectively implement
environmentally conscience programs such as mass transit.

Bluetooth Traffic Monitoring

Integreen’s goal is to use the relatively new technique of Bluetooth
traffic monitoring to gather data on vehicular and pedestrian traffic
throughout the city. By putting Bluetooth scanners at known locations
and combining the resulting data, Integreen can extrapolate data like
traffic density and average transit times without requiring costly and
hard to maintain traditional vehicle counters.
There are of course, some limitations to this technology. Naturally,
any vehicle (or at least, occupant riding in said vehicle) needs to have
a Bluetooth device, and even then, it must be set to the so called
“Discoverable” mode. While this does significantly lower the amount of
data you will be able to gather (compared to say, a device
which measures pressure on the road), it has the distinct advantage of
being many orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to deploy.
Even with the limited sample size that Bluetooth traffic monitoring
provides, there is still a wealth of data to be collected. As long as
you have a handful of devices that you can track around through the
city, you’ll be able to determine average transit times and locate the
areas of highest congestion. You’ll never be able to get an accurate
idea of how many vehicles are with Bluetooth traffic
monitoring, but you can certainly determine where the concentrations of
them are and how fast they are moving around.
Still, an educated guess can be made by comparing the physical
vehicles with the detected Bluetooth devices and finding a rough
average. If one road is equipped with the hardware required to count
physical devices, and that is compared with the detected Bluetooth
devices in the same area, a rough average can be found.
If you can estimate that 25% of vehicles have discoverable Bluetooth
devices with this method, it would be safe enough to multiply the number
of discovered Bluetooth devices in other parts of the city by 4 to get a
rough idea of how many physical vehicles there are.

Scanner Development

For this project, Integreen needed a low cost, rugged, and highly
efficient device which could be deployed for long stretches of time.
Answering the call was the ever popular Raspberry Pi
ARM development board, which gave the team at Integreen a powerful and
efficient Linux computer at a fraction of the cost of commercial traffic
monitoring systems.
Combined with off-the-shelf Bluetooth hardware, a battery pack, and
placed in a weatherproof plastic enclosure, the Raspberry Pi became the
perfect hardware platform for Integreen to conduct its research with.

Internals of Raspberry Pi Monitoring Device

So far, four such devices have been constructed and strategically
located around Bolzano. The team at Integreen is still fine tuning the
operation to determine the best location for their Bluetooth scanners,
and how to correlate their data to the real world traffic situation. So
far, the team has focused on physically counting vehicles passing over a
stretch of road, and comparing that to their Bluetooth scanners running
various different configurations.
With continued experimentation, the team hopes to both learn about
the ideal placement of these devices, and adjust their software to
return the maximum amount of data possible.
On the software side, developer Paolo Valleri has been working on adapting multiple FOSS software projects for use in the project.

Open Data

By
opening up the development of their Bluetooth traffic monitoring
system, Integreen is helping more than just the city of Bolzano. Their
project can serve as an inspiration for other communities who could
benefit from this type of data but either cannot afford or don’t have
access to traditional traffic monitoring systems.
It doesn’t seem like much, but having access to this kind of
information can be a huge advantage for small towns which might not
otherwise be adequately represented when it comes time to spend
development money. Being able to determine the flow of traffic is
essential in many aspects of city planning and management, such as
ensuring the safety of intersections and planning bus routes and stops.
Information that can make or break these kind of everyday services
shouldn’t be locked up, it should be in the hands of everyone who lives
in the community.
With the published details on their hardware setup and backend
software, Integreen is laying the groundwork for a whole new generation
of low cost vehicle monitoring It’s not unreasonable to imagine a future
where traffic data is crowd sourced by concerned citizens with their
own Bluetooth traffic monitoring devices all over the city, helping to
ensure the quality of life in their own communities.